This topic is meant for discussion and not for flaming, there’s no reason to lock it up. We just want to discuss.

I didn’t have any problem at all in the past weeks, support has been great, however, I see lots of threads being covered up around here. And I really means lots of them.

What happened to the transparent way of doing business? You think that by covering up and locking every topic with problems you’ll get people’s trust? I’m not sure if Envato staff is aware of this post https://medium.com/p/3a2af69cf977 but I can only guess that it won’t be long since we’ll see something like this for Envato. Honestly, this is just bad way of doing business.

If me, that have been around for 2 years now, having lots of items, start to lose credibility in Envato even though I didn’t have any problem, just imagine how the others will feel. You can’t just soft-disable people’s items and send them an e-mail AFTER you disable it. Do you even imagine what means to an author to soft-disable one of his best-selling item? We pay our bills from the earnings, we deserve at least a warning.

And even if you’d do the things the same, most of us fix the issues within..minutes of seeing it. However, reviewing that file again can take more than 1 day. Imagine what it means to have one item down for 1-2 days.

Try to FIX the problems, not to cover them up. You’re locking everything up, my trust in Envato is nearly zero right now and I guess this happens for lots of other authors. I can only hope I won’t have such problems.

So, what do you guys think? Also, please, let’s keep it calm here so they won’t lock this one up as well.

Again: This topic is meant for discussion and not for flaming, there’s no reason to lock it up. It’s not about any ticket or anything to fix.

The OP didn’t had a chance to respond a single time or what thread he is actually referring to. The thread where he asked envato to stop locking everything up got locked before he could write anything to explain himself.

I don’t see anything here being offtopic or anything that’s against the rules. It’s just a discussion. A suggestion. I would like things to be more transparent. I can only imagine myself being put in the same position and I wouldn’t like it.

I think Envato is too hasty with their soft disables, for example one of my Flash themes which sold over 1000 times with many happy customers was soft-disabled because one buyer complained he couldn’t stream MP3 from a radio service through the built in music player. The music player was only intended to play locally hosted mp3’s. No one else complained about streaming issues except one person, and because of that the whole file went down and all previous buyers can’t get support if they needed it now and I haven’t bothered to update it because I would have to dig up old code I built about 5 years back.

A simple message to the author about the issue before soft disabling would have prevented all of this, and Envato could have gotten my perspective since I built the file and know what it can and cannot do, but instead Envato takes one buyers opinion as reason to take a whole template offline.

FinalDestiny said
I don’t see anything here being offtopic or anything that’s against the rules. It’s just a discussion. A suggestion. I would like things to be more transparent. I can only imagine myself being put in the same position and I wouldn’t like it.

No rules broken there, nothing off topic. People are talking like humans and yet that thread is locked. And that is not the only one, just the first I found when scrolling down.

Staff acts like the thread got “resolved” with their answer and lock it up immediately so that there is no chance to say “no, this is not resolved”. They are talking about something another user brought up, without knowing if that is really what the OP was talking about.

That blog story you linked to is quite sad! Sometimes when you see lots of complaining on the forums that I have witnessed over the last year, especially as an author who doesn’t make much, it can seem like whining.

But then that story really does put things into perspective; authors really do rely on Envato to pay bills and they may be in critical situations where that money can mean the world of difference. This type of practise definitely needs to be changed quickly.

Often, threads get locked that users would like to continue discussing.

The staff locks these threads after providing an official answer. The reason is that otherwise, their response gets lost in the shuffle of a multi-page thread, and the thread ends up going around in circles as new voices in the thread chime in without reading the previous responses.

Users see this as stifling the discussion. And while that is certainly the result, it isn’t the staff’s purpose in locking the thread (excluding matters that need to be handled specifically through support which are inappropriate for the forum).

So we end up in a situation where in order for the staff to be “heard”, they have to lock the thread. We can only have a (visible) staff response or a discussion, but not both. Obviously, that’s bad in some cases. I do get concerned that sometimes the (Locked) flag gives the wrong impression – that staff is trying to “hide” something rather than make their own answers more easily discoverable. (Though trust me, if the goal were to truly hide something, the thread would be disabled rather than locked – meaning it would no longer be visible at all)

What I’d like to see is a “Mark as official answer” feature in the forum. This feature would only be available to staff members. Once the staff member has responded to the thread, they can mark their response as an official response, which will then be pinned to the top of the thread and highlighted, just below the original topic.

Using that type of strategy would ensure that the staff can make their responses known and easily found, without having to lock the thread. Constructive discussion within the forum rules can then continue if desired.

Maybe that doesn’t solve all the issues (there are a wide range of threads that get locked, some deservedly so, others not), but I think it would be a step in the right direction

I’ll take the other side of it; as someone who’s ran forums in the past and moderated hundreds of posts, I know there’s often times situations where bickering and flaming/trolling/complaining warrants locking/deleting threads.

Or threads that are offtopic/complaining/negatively impacts the customer experience here. Transparency is great, within professional boundaries. Polite requests for help, or polite disagreements are likely ok. But complaining about lack of features or other repeated negatives, for the umpteenth time isn’t constructive.

Try and think about it; look at negative vs positive comments; I understand both sides of it; main thing is to be constructive, professional and positive…individual support issues are best resolved via support ticket vs public posts, for example.

A simple solution to all of this would be an Author only forum section… the only reason heated topics get locked is because it’s open to the public… Author only forum would be highly useful to talk about sensitive topics.

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